stella! or fiat means of payment

The EU monetary union and its currency, the euro, has deeper roots, reaching back to the nineteenth century with attendant problems and complications, and was directly inspired by a earlier coalition by the name of the Latin Monetary Union. Founding members Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium decided in 1865 to tether their respective national coinage to a certain ratio of silver redeemable in gold, which was legal tender among all members.

Later Venezuela, Spain, Greece, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, Bulgaria and the Holy Sea joined—with even the United States of America seriously considering taking part in the grand experiment. I never realized that the national pride of the franc, peso, drachma and mark was not so long-lived and had been sublimed before. H told me about this earlier attempt but I never knew what the union was called. The currency, however, had barely overcome many structural challenges before its dissolution during the inter-bellum years. The ultimate failure was due, in the main, to an institutionalized practice of and market for debasing. Though the coin’s face value was honoured universally, some mints were debasing their coins (some of the usual suspects were the greatest offenders), using less precious-metal content than prescribed. Other opportunists, notably the Germans, took advantage of this differential in specie, exchanging coins from countries out of compliance for more valuable bullion. By the same reasoning contemporarily if one could have all of one’s wealth expressed with pennies and had a buyer for the zinc and copper, one could see the value almost double. Despite all its failures at conception, the Latin Monetary Union had a long run and I wonder what lessons are applicable to the current situation.

street smarts

Not to disparage conventional wisdom since there is much to be culled from a rare quality called common-sense and knowing better, but folk-neuroscience has practically invaded all aspects of public dialogue and holds up a very inaccurate but tantalizing fun-house mirror to ourselves.

Stock phrases and jargon, I think, are good vehicles for a whole host of excuses that prompt us to look in possibly the wrong direction. Self- assessments are imbued with the stuff of expediency, culture, what’s psychologically plausible and stereotype, and then become a template applied to the inner-workings of others and rarely, ironically to ourselves. It is a positive development that we can defer to our brains as captains of our destinies but more understanding, as social and political animals, is needed before we can really apply these sort judgments for anyone.

heart on your sleeve or windowpane

While I want to believe that the public, early-adopter, the technocrati, and developers have considered how convenience and novelty are drives easily deputized as the stuff of spies and snitches, but although I was not overly fond of the idea of the normalization of wearing certain blinders that kept one focused on something other than the here and now from a stand point of accelerating psychological concerns, I certainly did not extrapolate any higher-order concerns. All forms of surveillance and reconnaissance are already possible, of course, via a variety of measures which do not always talk to one another (this inability to communicate, I think, keeps a lot of us employed as interpreters, incidentally), but what implications are there to actually dispatching willing legions of monitors, eager (or at least persuadably so) to archive the whole of their experience without an editor or intermediary?

unmarked white van or deppenapostroph

Usually I am not one to rise above mild amusement and not call unnecessary use of quotation marks when I see them used liberally on signage (although there appears to be a certain fondness for this practice in Germany). When I see this superfluous punctuation I want to stoop and gesture and make those air apostrophes. I am not addressing that other practice that’s a terribly prevalent butchering of the genitive case—Gertie’s Pilsstube is more often seen than the correct Gerties.

There’s a rather non-descript service vehicle that I see around the neighbourhood (incidentally, I think unmarked white vans would be a great name for any entrepreneurial enterprise) with the decals along the side for ,,ROBERT” interior construction (Innen- und ausbau). I would never decry this one, since I later realized that “Robert” was most certainly the quite competent handy-man who re-did my little workweek apartment, the floors and all, by surprise. Perhaps ,,ROBERT” is some attempt at cultural integration or some byzantine regulatory requirement for truth in advertising. If it is really the service vehicle of Roberto, that don’t know but I try not to be one to police grammar and punctuation, since I know I have a lot of faults of my own. I tend to be hyphenation-happy, for one.

I do believe that there is room for license, according to the Army book of style, there are actual rules, which cascade out like poetry or that Monty Python skit about woody words. One should omit the hyphen when words appear in regular order and the omission causes no confusion in sound or meaning: banking hours, blood pressure, book value, census taker, life cycle, living costs, mountain laurel, palm oil, patent right, real estate, time frame, violin teacher. Well, I want to connect all of these with a dash. Next, one should compound two or more words to express an idea that would not be as clearly expressed in separate words, as in: bookkeeping, follow-on, forget-me-not, indepth, in-house, gentlemen, man-hour, man-year, newsprint, offload, railcar, right-of-way, yearend. Restraint should be exercised in forming unnecessary combinations of words used in normal sequence: atomic energy power, child welfare plan, civil service examination, income tax form, parcel post delivery, per capita expenditure, real estate tax, social security pension, soil conservation measures, special delivery mail. I don’t know about all of that. It seems to me like something that someone saw on a sign once and took to heart.

mcdoof

The latest cover and theme of Der Spiegel magazine (which I think though available on-line a perhaps regaled with more premium advertizing space will never be something out-of-print or solely archived in waiting-rooms) really poses a message to consider, especially taking into account how convenience foods are engineered for endurance.

 Maybe such an EU-style Surgeon General’s warning writ-large is needed. Taste and texture conspire for something that is not particularly memorable for the palette, lest one gets too inured to it, something unlike a very good meal that would be unseemly nonetheless to repeat too soon. This sort of subliminal, proletariat appeal is by design and a wonder of marketing and promotion, supported by an army food-hacks and production short-cuts. The fast-food industry and of course other addictive substances are able to buck the justification that “but I had Chinese for lunch” or “Greek just on Tuesday.” It is becoming harder and harder, however, to position oneself in a landscape to honestly choose and avoid the underlying staples.

global hawk or pretty bird

There’s a very blurry line between hobby helicopters and aerial surveillance drones, and I fear that government agencies, wanting to protect their assets and bailiwick will probably begin severely restricting what hobbyists can and can’t do. Just as much as there is an already growing public resistance to and fear of sky-spying, home-made drones could be easily deployed as Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots to jam the airspace. Technology can be a kill-joy and make things quickly accelerate.

Watching a demonstration video about a local club that builds and flies these kit vehicles, and how they navigate and stay oriented with the help of GPS, it all of a sudden became clear to me that the EU project to build a separate, parallel global positioning satellite array, Galileo, was not just a prestige project or a waste of money (the world’s current GPS telemetry provider is owned by the militaries of the US, Russia and China and although made available to the public for civilian use, could be switched off at any time). The European GPS is not being built for the benefit of toy helicopter enthusiasts or vacationers that might get lost along the way to their destinations but I guess for a strategic reality that might see the satellite signals cut off in order to stop rogue and rebel and recreation from interfering with the business of scouting. I wonder, however, if the dreary imaginations of the people who plan for these contingencies also consider that guidance is adaptive and there are plenty of other less lofty landmarks to go by.